Archive for the 'Security' Category

The biggest threat to cyber-security is surveillance. Or rather the will, ability and legal status of organisations who prioritise surveillance and active attack abilities above defence and security.

The point is, that surveillance does not mean passive wire-tapping. It means attacking infrastructure where the data you want is available unencrypted, or infrastructure through which the message or data travels. Infrastructure which might not be under control of the entity trying to gain these surveillance-capabilities. For instance it might target the sender or the recipient of an encrypted e-mail or instant-messenger message. Or an intermediary, in order to know who communicates with who in the first place. All these actions are not comparable with passive wire-tapping, in fact, these attacks are indistinguishable from hacker-attacks aimed towards any other goal, like the enactment of botnets; and they also enable the attacker not just to eavesdrop, but to do whatever else he pleases, from launching man-in-the-middle attacks to denial-of-service, ransomware, attacking somebody else and so on. So surveillance is an attack as any other.

The problem now stems from the fact, that in order to attack somebody, you need knowledge of insecure systems, vulnerabilities, on their part. Typically, what you use are exploits, and if they’re not published yet, they’re called zero-day-exploits. Now, as long as you don’t tell anyone, these vulnerabilities don’t get fixed. They might be found by somebody else, and published or not. As soon as they get published, they loose their value for attack. Now, during that period when you have a zero-day-exploit on your hands, you might mitigate that vulnerability on your systems. But you actually can’t mitigate them on all systems of your allies, because then the secret would go out. So you don’t. Which leads to one outfit having knowledge of vulnerabilities leaving every other outfit at risk.

In a practical example, 2013 a server was hacked, that was used by the NSA as staging system for attacks. The Shadow Brokers hack was made public only in 2016, and it turned out, the NSA had stashed a load of zero-day-exploits there, some of which were still zero-days in 2016, but the majority of them had already been made public. Now, not only illustrates this that independent researches will find these “secret” vulnerabilities eventually, but also something much more sinister: The NSA had actually put every other US-agency, including FBI and DOD, the government, critical infrastructure (including power plants, water supply and hospitals) and finally all its own citizens at risk.

With all the secret services world-wide, and often also police-units (For instance, the Zürich Police bought surveillance software from Hacking Team containing three zero-day-exploits) involved in ramping up their cyber-attack-capabilities, most often with the goal of surveillance, we can see an extreme effect on creating a market for zero-day-exploits. Where fifteen years ago no noticeable market existed at all, we now have one whose prices start at USD 40’000 and go up to USD 500’000 per exploit, as evidenced by the price-list published by Zerodium In other words, secret services and police are actively undermining the security of everyone on this planet, friend and foe alike.

The trouble is, highly technological societies are much more vulnerable to this. For guerillas, insurgents and terrorists the benefits of being able to exploit vulnerabilities is much greater, and they don’t really have to defend any friends from such attacks. So the ones that suffer the most, are the people and governments of exactly the same nations and states whose secret services and police are actively undermining their security. This is a grave situation, as most governments have not even realised what it is they have their secret services and police doing, and are actively trying to destroy their own security with initiatives that call for weakening of crypto or for government back doors. Or at least, trying to explicitly legalise these practices as seen with Switzerlands NDG, which of course will have a very much adverse effect of security.

The solution is surprisingly simple, the only impediment is, as usual, the widespread incomprehension of the problem itself. Since every vulnerability that is made public eliminates the exploitation of it for everyone, the only solution is to make every vulnerability public as soon as possible. The usual, and in fact “best practice” of the computer industry, is called “responsible disclosure”, where the manufacturer of a software or product is informed a few days or maximum weeks in advance, so he can fix the vulnerability, before the issue is made public. And in the end, it’s the only solution that will really make us more secure.

I decided to automate the whole procedure, at least the unpacking, signing and repacking. Each app has to have it’s own key (lest the apps signed with the same key can access each others ressources!) which was the thing that most needed automation.

So I wrote some shell-scripts. The scripts are not only useful for changing the permissions of an app from any source (unpack, edit AndroidManifest.xml, resign), but also for android developers themselves. it’s much easier to manage keys and sign different apps with them.

So here they are:

android-unpack Stupid script to decode .apk-files, all of those in a directory, actually.

android-resign Script to pack .apk-files, and sign them. Each project with it’s own key.

Of course, if you re-sign foreign apps with your own key, they won’t be the same ones as on the Android Market, and thus not automatically upgradeable and will not use the same configuration.

I’ve been sceptical about offerings of Security as Service. It’s sounds an awful lot like “Outsourcing Security”, and security is a process which involves every aspect of business or life.

However, I’m working now in a company which does just that, selling Security as Service. And I think it can work. As opposed to any other company which sells you a product, or some other services, if you’re selling security, you’ve got an interest in your customers security not being breached. Because you will loose that customer.

If you’re a Bank, you sell banking services. As long as the cost of one of your clients accounts being misused is not really your cost, the security of your clients is a total non-issue. The same goes for vendors of security-appliances. The client bought it, and already paid it, so if somebody hacks it, it’s not really your problem, unless you get bad publicity out of it.

And we’ve seen with the whole “full-disclosure”-debate, that bad publicity is a very weak instrument, and some companies can take hideous amounts of it before they improve security. Microsoft is the classical example; it took them aeons to do something about security, and the security of its products is still very weak.

On the other hand, if you get paid by subscription, you have a very real interest in keeping the customer. That means you have an interest of providing the services you are being paid for. If it’s not security the client pays for, this also means that security is probably not your concern (as seen with banks and credit card companies).

Of course, security embedded in you company will be much more capable and resilient. You can design every process with security in mind. You can choose specific products with a good security track-record. You can have system administrators with a very intimate knowledge of your network and IT-landscape, who can provide for a very fine-grained incident-response and emergency management.

But most smaller companies can’t have that. Because they don’t have the expertise, the money to hire specialists, and most of all, an IT-landscape that is not modeled by security-considerations but by habit. And habit is of course the biggest foe of security. It could be his friend too, but old habits die hard, and most people today grew up in a world where not everything was networked, and where systems of a company which gave a damn about networks and security were, and still are, prevalent. So the people in these companies don’t have the slightest clue about security, e-mail their passwords around, get their negotiations eavesdropped on mobile phones, infect their computers with viruses and get their e-banking accounts phished.

And this is where Security as Service can help. It can’t make you into a company where everything is secure. But it can mitigate some of the effects the security-unconscious acts of your employees cause. It can filter out malicious emails before someone can click on it, or some stupid mail client executes the malware-payload on its own. It can encrypt the emails at least between hosts. It can keep the botnets at bay that try to penetrate your servers. And it can provide incident-response if something goes wrong.

And finally, Security as Service is the fundamental better idea than Security as Product. Because Security is a Process, it never ends; and because with any product you bought, the sale is done, and the supplier is only interested in selling you another product, but not in making the already sold product better. Furthermore, if you lack the expertise, will you even be able to manage the product correctly?

There are those who can, with in-house security expertise, where it would be stupid to outsource it. But for the rest of us, there’s at least a certain measure of security available with Security as Service.

How bloody stupid must one be to react this way to a failed attack? Yes, failed means exactly that a security measure — in this case a terrorist attack that was thwarted by passengers(!) — works. But instead of relying more on what obviously works, the TSA (and of course, this one is backed by the government; proving that Bush and Obama really do the same bollocks) has decided to implement something else, something incredibly stupid which will actually lower security.

Security professionals worldwide don’t even know if they should laugh or cry at such a bold display of imbecility. I’ve not yet seen what Bruce Schneier has to say about this specific idiocy, but here’s an essay which essentially explains the issue: Screening People with Clearances. Just so you can see that I’m not the only security professional who thinks this way, and Bruce Schneier has rather more clout than me. ;)

Do you really think terrorists won’t be likely to fly NOT from those 14 countries? Or — gosh — use a false passport? Hell, they might even recruit people from a country deemed “safer”, the USA itself for instance. And of course, increased scrutiny of certain passengers will draw resources from scrutinizing other passengers.

Congratulations, you’ve just implemented a fast lane for terrorists while harassing other passengers coming from some 14 countries. Mindbogglingly stupid. According to Hanlon’s Razor I’m forced to conclude that the USA is run by drooling idiots.